2008 Design Merit Awards • Category: Residential
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House on Wild Creek, NC
Dustin Erhlich
Wild Creek, North Carolina
The House on Wildcat Creek is a single family residence built for a couple with grown children, on ten heavily wooded acres. The program includes three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a double height living space, a large kitchen with wine cellar, and a studio space to be shared by the owners. The master bathroom features an expansive elliptical walk-in shower, with multiple shower heads and body sprays, covered in a gradient mix of glass mosaic tiles. Many rooms open onto exterior spaces, such as the studio on the second floor, which opens onto the large roof deck over the garage through a wall of glass. In all, the home covers 3,149 square feet of indoor and 1,513 square feet of outdoor space.
Important to the owners is the separation of public and private spaces in the house. The first floor includes the public spaces of the kitchen and dining room, half bath, and living room. Rising up the sky-lit stairs, windows that at first seem randomly placed in the wall, begin to frame views of the site as you proceed up. At the top of the stairs you can continue right, to the studio and master suite, or left, into the guest wing. This separation allows the owners more control over the energy used to heat and cool this seldom used part of the house. This guest wing spans from the main house at one end, and is supported on the other by the workshop below. The span between the house and workshop acts as a canopy for the front door and a covered parking area for guests. The garage block is separated from the main house by a breezeway between itself and the dining room, with its glass overhead door, but is connected on the second level by the studio and aforementioned roof deck.
The separation of spaces comes not only from the public/private division, but from the homes fundamental architectural parti. Envisioned to originally been wrought of one solid block of space, certain elements have been pulled apart, repelled from each other by their disparate functions. This push/pull action is intended to parallel the fracturing and eventual separation of the owners from their children as they’ve grown up and moved away. These separated elements however, are still connected through delicate moments in plan, but appear more solidly connected to, and derivatively styled by, the main house. The fairly reserved exterior of the main house and the active plan within react to the push/pull through shifted spaces. As the guest wing pivoted out from the front of the house, it pulled the second floor with it, away from the back wall, where the floor joists are left exposed to tenuously stretch to connect the two. When the garage pulled away, the floor slid with it, creating the double height living room, and the solid of the projecting studio left the equally sized void witnessed by the roof deck, sunscreen, and flanked by a storage space and stair tower. And finally, the space for the metaphoric center of the home, the owner’s master bedroom, pushes through the back wall, with its glass wall cantilevered toward the woods.
Much of the house remains connected visually to itself and its site though use of materials taken from the local vernacular. Much of the area, including this very lot, is spotted with small centuries old barns, once used to hang and dry tobacco, the local cash crop. These barns are built with site-dug fieldstone foundations, clad in wood, and capped with a metal roof. Over time, the wood has aged and the metal rusted. The house’s corrugated metal siding, a naturally rusting Cor-4 alloy, is meant, along with the stone and wood, to emulate these ubiquitous buildings.
Another concern of the owners was that the home be a “green” building, but also had to be built on an accelerated delivery schedule. To this end, a hybrid system of site built and modular construction was used. The lower level of the garage block, the home’s foundation, and the partial steel support for the guest wing were erected on site, while the eight modules that make up the house were built in the factory. In all, the modules were built and set into place in a week and a half. Including site prep and finish work on the many custom finishes, the house was completed in just four months. Modular construction lends itself well to green construction, because of its precise process it produces almost zero waste. Material reuse was strictly enforced on the job site as well. Many of the interior walls which needed to be in place for structural stability during transportation, were cut out and replaced with steel columns to allow the open floor plan. That wood did not go to waste however; it was reused to complete the garage. Even the aluminum railings used on the roof deck, breezeway, and studio balcony were reused from a local school that was being demolished, preventing that material from going to a landfill. Other green strategies include an extremely efficient building envelope, taking advantage of high R-value insulation, low U-value low-E glass, and a white roof with high solar reflectance. The home’s spaces are also divided up into smaller HVAC zones to increase efficiency, and hot water is taken care of by a pair of tankless units.
